Via Seattle PI, startup Gist is coming out of stealth mode this week. The venture, backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, aims to reinvent the email inbox by aggregating relevant information about your contacts in one place. Previously, the product was called "Minebox". The site is slim on details, but seems to center around grouping information by contact. Different importance levels can be set for each contact, and the system pulls in feed pertaining to the contact or company.
Gist seems to share some similarity with San Francisco startup Xobni, who back in the spring, walked away from a $20M deal with Microsoft.
You can sign up for a beta invite at gist.com.
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While Gist is certainly unlocking much of the value of the inbox, we do not plan on recreating it. Despite their flaws products like Outlook, Exchange and Gmail work pretty well. We aim to merge the inbox (whichever one you have) with web data (news), thus giving Gist users a more holistic view of their key contacts and companies. Xobni is showing that providing a “person centric view” is valuable to Outlook users, we just take that a bit further by adding new content to the mix.
